Byron Bay man’s eco-friendly cleaning company Zero Co making $1m every month

The Aussie, who spent 18 months living in a tent in the wilderness, has found a way to earn seven figures. Here’s how.

A Byron Bay man, who spent 18 months living in a tent, is now raking in the cash, with his business making $1 million every month.

Mike Smith, 38, launched his cleaning and beauty company Zero Co in November last year.

“To get started I put every single available dollar I had into my business. It was about $100,000,” Mr Smith told news.com.au.

He admitted that his wife was “pretty nervous” but he “believed in the idea”.

Since then, he’s had a huge turnover with 38,000 customers across Australia.

“In the nine months since we started shipping, we’ve gone to about a million bucks a month in sales. It’s been amazing to see,” he said.

All that money is reinvested back into the business and he now has 17 full-time staff working under him.

They’re on track to reach $10 million sales by Zero Co’s one year anniversary.

Although Zero Co provides ordinary cleaning and beauty products such as stain removers, air fresheners and body wash, Mr Smith has credited its success to the materials used in the products.

The bottles and sachets are made from recycled single-use plastics that would have otherwise gone to landfill.

Mr Smith lived in the wilderness for 18 months, which is where he came up with the idea.

Mr Smith said he came up with the multimillion dollar idea for the lucrative business while living in a tent in the middle of nowhere.

“I convinced my now-wife to pack up our lives and go on the most crazy adventure,” the Byron Bay local said.

He had previously run two other successful start-ups – a surfing tech company and a wine business. Selling those on, he used some of the money to go on the trip of a lifetime.

“We basically lived in a tent for the better part of 18 months,” he said.

“We went to the most remote and far-flung corners of the planet.

“We trekked along the border of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, [went to] North Korea, to far northeast Russia.

“Having spent a lot of time in deep wilderness, I got shocked at the amount of plastic that made its way into those parts of the world.

“When you go real deep and find heaps of plastic, it’s pretty disconcerting.”

Eight million tons of plastic are dumped into the ocean every year, according to the Australian Marine Conservation Society.

He invested every dollar he had into the company.

Zero Co’s cleaning products are sent out in “forever bottles” – bottles created from plastic that has been taken out of the ocean.

To avoid plastic being thrown away, the bottles simply need to be refilled with cleaning pouches, rather than replaced entirely.

“In your starter box you get a set of refill pouches, and a replied paid envelope,” Mr Smith said.

“Then you send the used pouches back to us, then we clean and sanitise them and send to another customer.”

So far, 50,000 pouches have been sent back already.

The company has 10 products, with four more on the horizon.

Mr Smith has organised three ocean clean-ups to get together the plastic necessary for his enterprise.

In December 2019 he went to Indonesia where he pulled 500,000 water bottles worth of plastic out of the ocean.

Covid-19 delayed the launch of his business, with it getting in the way of his supply chains. It also meant he couldn’t do an international ocean clean-up, so he had to stick to Australia.

In April this year, Zero Co made headlines for the longest ever underwater clean-up by one person.

Filmmaker Dean Cropp, 38, spent 24 hours scuba diving without surfacing, which was a new world record.

As well as sinking $100,000 of his life savings into the project, Mr Smith used $750,000 from a crowd-funding campaign where 7000 Australians pre-ordered his products.

He started shipping out orders in November last year.

The company has launched a second crowd-funding campaign, set to last for 80 days, to roll out four new products – shampoo, conditioner, roll-on deodorant and body lotion.

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Originally published as Byron Bay man’s eco-friendly cleaning company Zero Co making $1m every month